In conventional customer enabled reporting and data management systems, a connection is made with a large legacy system via a dial-up connection from a customer owned personal computer or work station. This connection frequently, although not always, emulates a terminal addressable by the legacy system. The dial-up access requires custom software on the customer workstation to provide dial-up services, communication services, emulation and/or translation services and generally some resident custom form of the legacy application to interface with the mid range or main frame computer running the legacy system.
There are several problems associated with this approach:
First, the aforementioned software is very hardware specific, and customers generally have a wide range of workstation vendors, which requires extensive inventory for distribution, and generally, intensive customer hand holding through initial setup and installation before reliable and secure sessions are possible. If the customer hardware platform changes through an upgrade, most of these issues need renegotiation.
Secondly, dial-up, modem, and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, requiring extensive trouble shooting and problem solving for an enterprise desiring to make the legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards are involved.
Third, when an enterprise desires to make more than one system available to the customer, the custom application for one legacy system is not able to connect to a different legacy system, and the customer must generally logoff and logon to switch from one to the other. The delivery technology used by the two legacy systems may be different, requiring different interface standards, and different machine level languages may be used by the two systems, as for example, the 96 character EBCDIC language used by IBM, and the 127 character ASCII language used by contemporary personal computers.
Finally, the security and entitlement features of the various legacy systems may be completely different, and vary from system to system and platform to platform.
In the context of telecommunications services and products offered by large telecommunications network service providers for their customers, the assignee of the present invention, MCI, has deployed an MCI ServiceView (“MSV”) platform comprising a number of independent legacy systems enabling dial-up connectivity for those customers desiring to obtain the following network management service and reporting data pertaining to their telecommunications networks: priced call detail data and reporting; toll-free network manager “800NM” call routing data; outbound network management data; trouble ticket information; fault manager alarms. Limited interactive toll free network control is additionally supported whereby customers may change the configuration of their toll-free networks and “virtual” networks, i.e., Vnet networks. In addition to the MSV platform, the present assignee has implemented a variety of stand alone applications including: a Traffic View system enabling customers to perform real-time network traffic monitoring of their toll-free networks, and obtain near-real time call detail data and reports, and, a “Hyperscope” reporting system for providing reports on the performance of customers' Broadband (data) networks.
More particularly, MCI's ServiceView platform (“MSV”) provides for the generation of Toll-free Network Management data, priced call detail (“Perspective”) data for usage analysis and trending, each of which requires a different reporting mechanism due to the nature of the data being presented. Such reporting systems typically do not provide any report customization or presentation options for the customer, and any reporting customization is provided by an application specific program running on the client workstation. Furthermore, such systems do not readily provide for the scheduling of periodic or ad hoc “one-shot” reports.
Thus, what is needed is a comprehensive system that facilitates and simplifies customer access to, and management of, all of their telecommunications network assets and enterprise telecommunications network management products and services to which they have subscribed.
The rapid adoption and use of the internet for data exchange has prompted a desire on the part of customers to access their data over the internet.
The popularity of the public Internet provides a measure of platform independence for the customer, as the customer can run their own Internet web-browser and utilize their own platform connection to the Internet to enable service. This resolves many of the platform hardware and connectivity issues in the customers favor, and lets the customer choose their own platform and operating system. Web-based programs can minimize the need for training and support since they utilize existing client software which the user has already installed and already knows how to use, i.e., the browser. Further, if the customer later changes that platform, then, as soon as the new platform is Internet enabled, service is restored to the customer. The connectivity and communications software burden is thus resolved in favor of standard and readily available hardware and the browser and dialup software used by the public Internet connection.
An Internet delivered paradigm obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the public Internet and run within a standard web-browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues.
For the enterprise, the use of off-the-shelf web browsers by the customer significantly simplifies the enterprise burden by limiting the client development side to screen layouts and data presentation tools that use a common interface enabled by the web browser. Software development and support resources are thus available for the delivery of the enterprise legacy services and are not consumed by a need for customer support at the work station level.
It would be highly desirable to provide an integrated system that provides for secure connectivity to telecommunications enterprise legacy systems over the public Internet. The public Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various disparate security protocols, telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards, thereby providing a measure of platform independence for the customer.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide an Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system that provides a common GUI enabling both report requesting, customizing, scheduling and viewing of various types of data from different back-end telecommunications service and applications.
It would also be highly desirable to provide a Intranet/Internet/Web-based data management system infrastructure capable of providing telecommunications products and services data to customer's over the Intranet.
It is therefore desired to provide connectivity to enterprise legacy systems providing telecommunications network management services over the public Internet, as the Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards.